Airing of satirical Obama song is offensive Absurd Help Spare them

VOICE OF THE PEOPLE I heard recently that on Rush Limbaugh's radio show he aired a song with the lyrics, "Barack the Magic Negro lives by the sea and frolics in the autumn mist in a land called D.C." This is one of the most offensive things I have ever heard. The "Magic Negro"? What makes Barack Obama magic? The fact that he is educated, well spoken and doesn't have a prison record, or is the magic the fact that he is the first minority candidate in U.S. history who has a very real chance at becoming the next president of the United States? Limbaugh has also been quoted as saying that Obama should renounce his blackness and call himself white. This is the same kind of racism used by Don Imus and he got fired. The question is why is it OK for Rush to say these things? Is it because he is the mighty Rush Limbaugh, voice of the right wing? Or maybe it is OK because it is just political satire. Whether or not you like Obama is not the issue. The issue is Limbaugh is using his star status and his radio show to spread racist viewpoints across America. Why aren't the sponsors pulling their funding? Why hasn't there been the week-long press coverage and news articles? I guess racism is OK as long as your ratings are high. I'm as fervent in my disapproval of President Bush's policies as anyone, but I can't let Douglas Golden's letter of May 12 go unanswered. At least one of the points he makes is quite simply absurd. We did not create a terrorist state in Iraq. Saddam Hussein did that. Certainly our inept handling of the war has aggravated the problems, but they will not end when we pull out our troops. The terrorists will not leave Iraq. Sunnis will continue to kill Shiites, and vice versa. The civil war will probably escalate. The Middle East will become even more of a tinder box than it has been for the past several thousand years. The fact is that there are now no simple solutions. Yes, Bush and his advisers bear a great deal of the blame for this mess, but the Iraqis themselves have done little or nothing to improve matters. Let's try for a balanced point of view, neither the rabid right of a Dorothy Elkins nor the uninformed left of a Douglas Golden. I used to read a magazine article titled "There ought to be a law." It came to mind when I saw the notice of a huge profit again by Chevron this past quarter. It got my attention, even though it was one or two paragraphs on the back page of the sports section in with other briefs about business. A day or two later, there was an article on the front page about how difficult it is to hold gas prices down because of the refining problems and the cost of a barrel of oil. Dear me, I'm having trouble making sense of it all. All this time I thought it was those greedy, evil OPEC folks with their heels on our necks. I realize that God will even it all out eventually, but isn't there anything Congress can do in the meantime? Once again The Tribune was lurking around the Polizzotto family not wanting to miss a private moment of grief as witnessed by the picture on the front page of the Local section May 19. This time spare us the self-serving letter telling us we need to know. We do not need to know. We need to respect this family and spare them from The Tribune's tabloid-ness.